Membership is offered in the spring on “Tap Day,” which has taken on many different forms and rituals.

A “mock society” known as Bull and Stones was active mid-century with the sole aim of disrupting the business of Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key by, among other pranks, breaking into the Bones tomb, stealing their food deliveries, “ wires across the known path by which the Keys members returned to their rooms, to make them stumble and fall” and generally provoking them.

The second, Scroll and Key, was founded in 1842 after members of two rival junior fraternities refused to come together as “brothers” when elected to Skull and Bones.

Yale’s first secret society, Skull and Bones, was founded in 1832 when Phi Beta Kappa (imported from the College of William and Mary) shed its own mantle of secrecy.

William Huntington Russell, class of 1833, scared some classmates by appearing “draped to personate a ghost with a white sheet closely wrapped around his head and body,” as quoted from the memoir of one of those classmates.

The idea to found a secret society was inspired by a college prank.

(Richards apparently had even more to say his “director’s cut” of the text is housed in the Manuscripts and Archives area of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.) For outsiders who might press their noses against the societies’ windows-if only more of them had windows-here’s a brief chronology and other tidbits: sponsored byĪvailable via Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the book is an exhaustive 821-page tome that may seem as impenetrable as Skull and Bones’s brownstone fortress on High Street near Chapel. But David Alan Richards’s Skulls and Keys: The Hidden History of Yale’s Secret Societies (2017) promises a deeper dig into their “hidden world,” to explore how these elite organizations “have fundamentally shaped America’s cultural and political landscapes” and to bring to light a surprising “progressive side… that we rarely hear about,” according to the jacket copy. Bearing provocative names-Skull and Bones ( map), Scroll and Key ( map), Wolf’s Head ( map), Book and Snake ( map) and others-they’re often portrayed in melodrama or myth. They’re the “tombs” of Yale’s senior societies, better known as secret societies. You can pass by many times before you realize something odd: most have no windows, and you’ve rarely if ever seen anyone entering or leaving. Their facades often seem intended to blend with their ivied surroundings.

Skull and bones presidents